


seconds, minutes, days, weeks

by santanico



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Torture, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:11:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/santanico/pseuds/santanico
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky finds and hoards the shield.</p>
            </blockquote>





	seconds, minutes, days, weeks

**Author's Note:**

> post-winter soldier - so mostly dealing with bucky's headspace, so that includes mentions of trauma/torture.

First, he drags the strange man with the sad eyes onto the shore.

Second, he walks away.

Third, he stares at his knuckles and wonders if he digs his nails into his skin, will he bleed?

Fourth, he strips off everything but his pants and dives back into the water. He swims and swims and swims and he finds it. His lungs beg him for air. He ignores them.

Fifth, he swims back to shore with the shield on his back.

Names – memories ripple through his head. It’s a storm, thunder and lightning and a dull ache in the back of his brain. He doesn’t know what to do with the hunk of indestructible metal, so he walks with it clenched in his metal fingers for miles, avoiding cities and towns and staying where no one will find him.

“ _Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._ ”

He remembers falling. He remembers forgetting. He remembers being erased.

He remembers a man calling him a weapon and stroking his hair and he remembers electric shock and torture and pulses through his bloodstream.

He remembers mouth guards to keep him from biting off his own tongue. He remembers needles and he remembers pain. He remembers searching endlessly and doing a job that now – means nothing.

He sits in a wooded area and his long hair dries. He looks at his arms, looks at the stitching between his shoulder and the metal. Like he’s some kind of fucking robot.

He drags those same metal fingers along the shield, and they scrape together and look like they might almost spark.

He wraps his arms around the shield and holds it to his bare chest.

The Winter Soldier never slept before, and he doesn’t start now.

Bucky.

Winter Soldier.

However those two things – those names – collide…He isn’t sure.

He doesn’t know what the feeling is, the clawing in his chest that tells him he’s a person and not just a weapon. That he always has been, but they tore him apart. Hacked into pieces so all he knew was how to kill.

“ _People are gonna die. I can’t let that happen._ ”

When it happens, it’s more painful than any of the shock treatments, the destruction, the bullet wounds, the sounds of mechanics as his arm was torn from his skin and reworked.

When it happens, he loses control. He’s crying, and the sobs shatter through him. They remind him that he’s alive – no matter how much it hurts.

He hoards the shield like a prize and as a reminder. He steals clothes from apartments in the dark, covers the metal arm so he can sneak into shops and steal food as well. He doesn’t need money and he’s still fast, still knows his training and knows how to react to his surroundings. He knows how to not be intimidating; he knows how to smile gently when people stare.

He cries every day now, and he starts to sleep in forgotten alleys because they seem safest, though he isn’t afraid of anyone trying to stab him to death. He still has his knife, tucked in his boot, and he’s wearing jeans now, which are so much more comfortable. His chest heaves with his breaths, with his tears. They start to feel natural, though he doesn’t.

He protects the shield, because it’s a memory in of itself. It brings things back. He wonders if – Steve – is looking for it. If Steve is looking for _him_.

He reads the newspaper, and at first the words blur together but they he starts to understand the articles. About Captain America disappearing. No one can say where he’s gone, where he’ll be.

“ _You’re my friend._ ”

He sleeps curled up in the shield. He thinks his name over and over again. The name that belonged to him before they depersonalized him and turned him into a weapon. James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky. Steve Rogers’ best friend. And orphan. A soldier. A flirt. Cold, perhaps, because he was in love.

The breeze doesn’t feel like ice on his skin the way it used to.

He sinks further into the protection of the shield, and he weeps.

It’s all he has of a life he doesn’t think he’ll ever regain.


End file.
